Neighborhood Oversubscribed?
I am currently paying for the 300mbps service. The past two years or so I have not gotten over ~90mbps area, wired or wireless. While 90mbps is still pretty awesome, there are times where Im just wishing I was getting closer to what I'm supposed to be subscribed for to speed things up. I have also noticed reliability issues. Last night for instance, I had 100% packet loss occur twice in about a 30 minute window.
Im running the Spectrum issued modem with a Netgear Nighthawk R8000. It's past it prime of being the market leader, but it should still have more than enough hardware specs to get me to the 300 mark and beyond. All my devices have link rates well above 300, except for an old 2010 macbook which is right at 300.
I started to get suspicious of my router's hardware. I nuked it with a factory reset and made certain none of the extra features like QoS, AC list, and VPN. Ran a speed test and I was running at ~95mbps. turned on AC list and its still at 95mbps. I ran a transfer between devices and it was at around 700mbps. Ran a smart phone tool call wifi sweet spots that im assuming does something similar, and it was getting around 700mbps. I've tried analyzing the wireless in my area and switched to less populated channels. Is there something else I can do to test the network performance on the client side?
Ive had techs come out on about three different occasions. Replaced all the ground coax to the spectrum tie in box(assuming thats housing something similar to a basic switch), replaced the coax coming into the house that ties into the router. I had one tech mention that he was able to notice that a neighbor had absolutely no signal. Another mentioned that he was reading signal loss further down stream. It's an old neighborhood and when I first moved out here a few years ago, Spectrum was the only cable/fiber provider. I know the majority of people in this neighborhood of ~500 homes alone is on Spectrum, that doesn't even count all the homes in the surrounding area that were probably only able to get online with Spectrum.
Does this sound like the infrastructure is dated and/or oversubscribed? I have seen a couple houses with AT&T fiber on the ground like it's a new install. Is it time to jump ship too?
Best Answers
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It sounds to me like the Ethernet WAN link between the modem and router is 100-limited. Do some testing to determine if the fault is on the modem downlink port or the router uplink port or the Ethernet cable in between. Make sure both ends of the cable are fully seated to such extent that the tangs are locked and examine both ports with a 🔍 to make sure that all of the contacts are straight and upstanding. Test the modem downlink by connecting the laptop directly to it with one and then another Ethernet cable and make sure the modem and router are both well ventilated et c.
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100% was the ethernet cable between modem and router. Swapped it out and were churning and burning
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